Case Study

Improved Contact Center Experience for Patients – Just What the Doctor Ordered!

Improved Contact Center Experience for Patients

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Ensuring high-quality subscriber exchanges with Contact Center in support of insurance issues
  • Ongoing IT challenges in differentiating application, network, UC, and service interdependency performance issues
  • Expanding remote facilities environment requiring visibility and monitoring
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform with InfiniStreamNG™ appliances
  • nGenius® packet flow switch appliances
  • nGeniusPULSE Server and nPoints
The Results
  • Improved subscriber experience in resolving their insurance issues
  • Enhanced application performance troubleshooting reduces superfluous NOC calls

 In 2 business days, nGeniusPULSE provided network and application performance troubleshooting capabilities the healthcare provider had been requesting for 1 year from another provider.

Customer Profile

This leading U.S. healthcare provider has delivered family, emergency, and specialty care services for the last 50+ years, today supporting more than 9 million patients across numerous regions. The healthcare provider is committed to delivering safe, swift diagnoses and personalized treatment plans to its patients, and that requires allocating significant organizational resources to both staffing and regional delivery.

The Challenge

As part of the organization’s attention to patient care, the healthcare provider offers their subscribers ready access to knowledgeable representatives through a highly available Contact Center that is tasked with addressing insurance questions and business issues. Using a consultative approach, Contact Center agents quickly access patient record applications to provide callers with an informed, secure conversation regarding their insurance coverage issues.

Establishing the technical infrastructure required to support a Contact Center of this size and scope has been a major endeavor for the provider, and due to its impact and popularity, has only increased in size in recent years. As a result, more than 35 additional remote sites were accessing the Contact Center’s Voice over IP (VoIP) services, and there was an increase of 50,000+ daily subscriber calls requiring requests all involving successful Voice over IP (VoIP) setup and efficient Contact Center agent access to patients’ insurance records.

This 70% increase in subscriber calls resulted in an opportunity to expand NETSCOUT service assurance visibility throughout the two primary data centers. They needed broader visibility into the network traffic traversing data centers for IT to diagnose whether a Help Desk call related to a network, application, or voice or, rather, to the third-party firewalls, session border controllers (SBCs), SIP trunks, and contact center infrastructure solutions included in their expanded technology footprint.

The healthcare provider’s business growth presented other challenges to the IT team. All told, their real estate footprint had grown to a total of 75 agent locations and 125 remote sites, which all now required visibility and performance monitoring. The IT team had found other tools and approaches woefully ineffective, and they had grown increasingly frustrated regarding this lack of visibility.

With any delays in accessing business applications or call set-up ultimately impacting patient time on the phone and the employee’s ability to handle optimal numbers of subscriber calls, the healthcare provider identified a need to refresh and expand their service assurance technology platform.

Solution in Action

The healthcare provider is enhancing visibility and management of their expanded business service environment by installing NETSCOUT® InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances and nGenius packet flow appliances at two primary data centers.

The IT team now benefits from pervasive visibility into network traffic flows, using the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology to convert the healthcare provider’s high-value network packet data to generate “smart data” for nGeniusONE’s smarter analytics. In promoting this pervasive visibility, the nGenius packet flow switches installed at the data centers reliably feed network traffic to the ISNG appliances hosting ASI technology. As a result, the IT team has visibility that was formerly lacking into voice streams, with nGeniusONE service dashboard and service monitor analysis providing single-pane views into VoIP performance and Contact Center agent experience.

Additionally, the IT team gained remote site visibility by deploying NETSCOUT’s nGeniusPULSE solution to perform synthetic business service delivery testing and make VoIP calls, finding potential user experience issues before patients are impacted. IT can now visualize high-level network and application performance at remote locations, using nGeniusPULSE nPoints deployed at those facilities to support active, synthetic testing to verify the availability and performance of the network, applications, VoIP, and other services. nGeniusPULSE dashboards provide visualization of availability and performance latency, providing IT resources with the means to separate application and network issues.

The Results

For an IT team tasked with managing technology performance in the expanded healthcare provider network without visibility, the next-generation NETSCOUT solution brought nearly immediate returns on investment.

While the IT team had sought a solution to improve remote site visibility and performance monitoring for nearly a year, nGeniusPULSE active testing provided the needed functionality just 2 days after rollout, with nGeniusPULSE nPoints easily deployed to remote facilities to provide visibility into performance and support nGeniusPULSE testing. With technology efficiency of paramount importance in this expanding healthcare delivery environment, the IT team uses nGeniusPULSE every time a Help Desk call relating to a remote application issue is received, with at-a-glance dashboard views providing the means to immediately rule out the network in the first phase of troubleshooting. In this manner, the Network Operations Center team is relieved of the onus of unnecessary inclusion in service ticket troubleshooting.

In addition to supporting enhanced Contact Center service performance delivery to subscribers, the NETSCOUT solution extends the healthcare provider’s return on investment in its existing nGeniusONE deployment, as the platform’s analytics leverage both next-generation InfiniStream and ISNG data sources, as well as multiple nGenius packet flow switch appliance models now in production. IT resources already familiar with nGeniusONE workflows can now apply that knowledge for efficient multi-vendor call path and data center infrastructure troubleshooting, thanks to the expanded smart visibility provided by ISNG and nGenius packet flow switch appliances.